Hello World

Hello World 🌎

It feels very strange and honestly scary to be writing a blog post - it's like throwing my words out into the abyss of the web. I felt some resistance to doing this because it seems like everyone has a blog nowadays. I'm also not a very big user of social media. I'm worried that our culture is becoming far too entranced and reliant on it. Anyway, I'll save that topic for another time.

So who am I and why am I writing this? My name is Matt Bordas. I'm a computer scientist by trade - UC Davis CS class of 2016. Go Aggies! 🐮 I'm currently working on computational biology with the Amaral Lab of Northwestern University 🧬 I grew up in Huntington Beach, Orange County in Southern California. I'm currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Oakland.

So how did I get here? On top of all the turmoil of this year, I made the excruciatingly painful decision to leave my startup - Time by Ping - as I needed to take a break after co-founding it roughly 5 years ago in college. For the inexperienced and wide-eyed 21 year old founder that I was at the time, I thought startup success in Silicon Valley was working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is the dogma that is conveyed in pop culture and by some of the very best entrepreneurs.

That mindset led me to work and live at a breakneck pace which ostensibly painted a picture of progress, but I think I only wrote bugs the majority of the time when I coded after 5pm and it definitely wore me out. When I do it again, and I know there will be a next time, it will be much different. Overall though, it was a special experience that I wouldn’t have wanted to happen any other way. I have immense respect for the current team and what they are doing. I’m confident they will continue to be successful and I’m excited to watch them grow into the future.

After leaving Time by Ping, I took time off and sheltered in my apartment, as one does during COVID quarantine. I did a lot of exploration and soul searching. I dove deep into finance and trading for a few months. Financial markets, investing, and trading have always been a passion of mine. I thought that's what I wanted to do next, but I realized that it's more of a side project for now. Biology, specifically aging, has always been a keen interest. I believe that in the next 20-40 years, in my lifetime, we will solve most diseases and evolve into a society where aging is something we can manage and calibrate individually. My confidence has further risen given the advancements in CRISPR, mRNA, and ADCs.

I was lucky enough to have an amazingly kind, genuine, and generous friend and mentor, Thomas Stoeger, at the Amaral Lab in Northwestern. I reached out to him and asked if I could help with anything they were working on. He said yes (wooh!!) and we’ve been working on a project ever since. It’s been really gratifying work thus far. The people are some of the warmest and smartest I’ve ever worked with. We’ll see where the future takes me, I’m looking at a bunch of biotech companies in Cambridge, Massachusetts and am thinking about applying in the next 3-6 months after this project wraps up.

-- Matt